Screening out the human

Jim sat in his wheelchair and with his permission I sat on the edge of his bed to be able to chat with him.  He lived at the nursing home where I came once a month to lead a morning prayer service, and this was the first time in years we had really talked.  It was the first time I was in his room, rather than just chatting in passing in the common room before and after the service.

Tomorrow is his birthday, he told me.  Said he will be 67, and when asked, suggested that maybe the reason he looks younger than me is he still has a good head of dark hair.  Unprompted, he told me he is happy.  Asked why, he said because he is alive, because he "has his brain back" after suffering a stroke, and because of his family whose pictures he showed me on the wall above his bed.  "I have so much, and some people don't," he said, with one of the most honestly contented looks on his face and in his eyes that I have seen for some time.

The reason I was talking with him was that I missed the memo.  The nursing home activities director had emailed me earlier in the morning that due to staff turn-over and illness, they were cancelling the prayer service.  Not enough staff to manage what needed to be done to make it happen.  I didn't log on, though; I was out of the electronic loop, showed up not knowing the plan ... and found myself with some unexpected free time just to visit with some of the prayer service regulars.

And because I was out of the electronic loop, because I failed to plug in and log on and look at my laptop screen, I found myself serendipitously receiving some wonderfully warm, personal and welcome schooling in gratitude, one of the foundational elements of any honest spirituality. 

A few hours later I was on the run again, this time rushing into a Tim Horton's for a meeting with another staff member at the church.  I placed my order, paid for it, and got my coffee.  Then, in the very few seconds it took to move down the counter to the prep area to wait for my Chicken Ranch Wrap Snacker (my lunch), disaster struck.  The in-store computer network went down, all orders were lost from the now-blank screen in front of the prep person, and no amount of hitting the refresh button was bringing anything back on line.

And she did try.  A lot.  Frantically.  Panic gripped her face, and terror of the unknown pooled deep in her eyes.  She wasn't trained for this.

Shortly, though, I and the couple waiting beside me were able to calm her, and convince her we could tell her what we had ordered, and she would still be able to prepare it for us.  And it worked.  What a wonderful system!

It really felt wonderful.  Yeah, there was risk to Tim Horton's that we would make up some order ridiculously more expensive than what we had actually paid for.  But for once -- and I never really noticed its absence until this moment of its restoration, we completed our order at the counter with a real, honest-to-goodness, person-to-person interaction about what we were doing, without a screen between us guiding our every action and making trusting, human conversation between us unnecessary.

It's enough to make me wonder.

Thinking of The Second Coming outside an LCBO

Judgement of the Nations -- The Sheep and The Goats

(an image from South Yarra Community Baptist Church)  

I'm still troubled by something I saw early Monday afternoon outside the University Plaza LCBO.  As I sat in the car near the door of the store, waiting for Japhia who was inside to make a purchase, I saw the entire unfolding of an altercation between a man and a young, hoodied male.

The man was walking into the store, right behind Japhia.  The hoodied young guy came zooming between them on a stunt bike, missed the man by inches, dropped his bike against the store wall, and made to follow the man into the LCBO.  Rather than just go into the store, the man made a comment to the young guy about his lack of consideration.  The young guy got angry.  The argument escalated as they stood just inside the store door, until the young man abruptly and angrily turned around, left the store, and yelled back at the man, calling him a "f****** nigger,"  latching on to the most hurtful and disrespectful thing he could think of to say, focused on the colour of the man's skin.

The man came running out of the store after the young guy who quickly hopped on his bike and used it to stay a safe distance from the man while continuing to scream the racist taunt against him.  Not once but a number of times.  While the man yelled back, saying he would "get him."  

And I sat in the car not more than ten feet away.  Just watching.  From inside the car.

Japhia, who heard all this happen from inside the store, at least was able to touch the man on the arm a few minutes later when she stood beside him in the check-out line, to  communicate support and care.  Even then she was troubled that that was all she was able to do.

Like her, I would like to have that moment back so I could get out of the car, stand as brother with the man suffering the racist taunt, and make it clear to the hoodied young male that his racist slur is not acceptable and is not tolerated by people around him.

But I didn't.  

Why not? 

It wasn't fear.  Nor moral indifference.  
 
What I remember is that at the time it felt a bit like I was just watching TV.  I was totally drawn into what I was seeing, but somehow it seemed there was a screen of some kind between me and what I was seeing.  It wasn't that I rejected the thought of doing anything.  It's that doing anything more than just watch the unfolding drama didn't even really present itself as an option. Wasn't even in mind or on the table at that moment.  Just didn't exist.

And I wonder, how did I get there?  To that point of radical, unconscious disengagement?

Was it because by the time I got to that spot, I was already feeling depressed, disconnected and resentful from four hours spent that morning in the hospital sitting mind-numbingly through a four-hour test process?  Is that what predisposed me to such terrible disengagement, to merely spectating the social story being written around me without realizing responsibility to take a part in the daily writing of it?

But then ... I wonder if the young hoodied guy also feels that same mixture of depression, disconnection, and resentment in his life, for all kinds of other reasons.  And is that part of why he reacted as angrily, hurtfully and viciously as he did when he was challenged to be civil and respectful of others?

I think I've always found a secret satisfaction in the last two lines of the first verse of W. B. Yeats' sonnet, "The Second Coming":  "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity," because even at times when I seem to lack conviction (or at least, the action that would express conviction), I can still imagine myself in some self-satisfied way as being numbered among "the best" -- superior to, and separate from "the worst."

But now I have to wonder, are the sadly uncommitted "best" and the passionately active "worst" more alike, and on more common ground than I have imagined?  Are I and that hoodied, young male more blood brothers than I know, in our common feelings at times of depression, disconnection and resentment in life?  And really co-authors together more than I admit of the terrible narrative of social unravelling being written all around us -- him by acts and words of vengeful hate, me by becoming mere spectator of the narrative being written. 

I wonder ... what does it mean and where does it lead, to see myself as brother both to the man who suffered the racist abuse, and to the hoodied young male who hurled the epithets with such recentful venom?  And at times maybe more to the latter than the former?